He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.
– Samuel Johnson

So how many questions, issues, and decisions are bouncing around in your head? As an elderly family member aged I became increasingly frustrated with how she was making her life complex when it didn’t need to be. Simple decisions, eventually even tasks such as deciding what to watch on TV, became impossible. Her anxiety was skyrocketing and I realized it was a vicious cycle.

The more we put off decisions and tasks, the more we are juggling in our heads. This makes it increasingly difficult to calmly and rationally evaluate an issue and come to a conclusion, which just adds to the chaos.

Stop the cycle. Do you really need more time or more data to evaluate an issue? Sometimes you legitimately do in order to stay focused on a task at hand, but I bet you’d be surprised how often you don’t. Think about what more information you’d really need and whether it would change your mind. What is the worst that could happen if you were wrong?

Take the extra second and make the decision. When an employee asks to talk to you, do it now rather than putting it off. Deal with it once, then it is out of your head, decluttering your mind.

An abundance of choices and the decisions that accompany them are both a benefit and curse of the modern world. Each decision we make, no matter how small, uses up a little bit of the mental energy we have available every day. By focusing on reducing our options and minimizing the number of choices we must make, life becomes simpler and calmer.

David Cain recently wrote a great piece on his Raptitude blog on decision-making and minimalism called Why the Minimalists Do what They Do. As an aspiring minimalist, the topic appealed to me, and Cain’s commentary on choice and decisions was especially apropos.

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always had an ability to make good decisions quickly, regardless of whether I base them on real analysis or just wing it from the gut. (Yes, intuitive decisions can still be good.) This skill has been invaluable in my career and my personal life. However, most people I know are less fortunate, and I’ve noticed how indecision impacts many aspects of their lives. From professional decisions such as what path to take with a new product development project, to personal decisions such as where to go for dinner, not being able to make a decision creates stress for both the person making the decision and those being impacted by the decision.

The problem is compounded with age. For example, in a relative’s last years, I watched her become literally debilitated and frozen by even the most basic decisions. Because she couldn’t make decisions, the number of undecided issues made her life appear to be unnecessarily and impossibly complex.

To combat our indecision, we need to simplify our lives. Cain describes how he eats the same thing for breakfast every morning. By doing so, he removes a couple of decisions from his day, allowing him to focus better on other things. I can relate. My breakfast is the same cup of Greek yogurt and Grape Nuts each morning. I eat it while reading The Wall Street Journal on my iPad, just after my morning meditation and stretching, and just before reviewing my journal and starting my Hour of Power. I do this every day. The routine is satisfying, and calming.

The implications of reducing our number of choices go far beyond our daily meals. Simple is clearer, and fewer options tax the brain less. For example, the best websites intuitively guide you among very few choices. Well-planned standard work reduces the variation of subjectivity while providing a foundation for kaizen. In other words, when workers don’t have to make unnecessary decisions, they have the mental energy to explore better ways to perform their tasks.

Where can you reduce options in your life and in your organization, thereby reducing the waste and unnecessary complexity of indecision, and the variability of multiple decisions?

For the past couple weeks I've been digging into employee handbooks as a startup I'm involved with has grown to the point of needing one. Few perhaps realize how that document, usually given to you on your first day and then mostly forgotten, shapes culture and thereby fundamental organization performance.

As one reference point, a company I've recently worked for has a 40+ page tome that starts every section with "COMPLIANCE IS ESSENTIAL" highlighted in bold, with "required to conform" sprinkled liberally throughout the document, ending with a meaty discussion of the punitive measures that would happen upon deviation. And that's a company very innovative in very many ways.

On the other extreme is Zaarly, a San Francisco startup. Their employee handbook, posted online, talks directly to culture. In the "Rules for Work" section it begins with "we don't have these." And in a style prevalent throughout the document, adds that "if you want to coast, we recommend you apply for a job at Craigslist." There are some good thoughts on teams, work, and communication – but no rules.

Then there's the famous Netflix "business culture" PowerPoint that serves as their employee handbook. Similar to Zaarly it talks a lot about culture and a lack of rules. There is no vacation policy, and the travel and expense policy is literally five words: "Act in Netflix's best interests." That's it. But unlike Zaarly, Netflix does say some rules are necessary, such as "Absolutely no harassment of any kind." Completely agree, especially on that item.

Netflix believes high performance people people should be free to make decisions, and those decisions need to be grounded in context. Mission, vision, and value statements do not create context – and Netflix provides the example of how Enron's value statement included "integrity." Real company values are shown by who gets rewarded, and embody behaviors and skills. The document goes on to describe the primary Netflix values and the associated behaviors.

In the world of Netflix, as basically summarized on slide 74, flexibility is more important long term than efficiency. To inhibit the chaos that too much flexibility in a large organization can create, hire (and keep) only high performance people. High performance people make great decisions, which are better than rote rules. Later on there is good discussion on managing with context, context not control of people, and when something fails figuring out what went wrong in the context rather than in the people.

Perhaps a part of the Netflix document that gave me pause was an insinuation that defined processes are a negative. As those of us in the lean world know, standard work is the foundation for kaizen. To improve you need to know what you're doing – consistently. But it doesn't necessarily mean a lack of flexibility, and the level of detail in the standard work is dependent on the application.

Yesterday our friend Brad Power posted a piece in Harvard Business Review titled Drive Performance by Focusing on Routine Decisions that hits at a similar concept. Instead of creating rule-bound defined processes, improve the quality of the decision points. He illustrates the idea with an example those of us in the manufacturing world have all experienced: the potential maelstrom of materials control.

These two stories highlight the advantages of focusing process improvement on “diamonds and arrows” — i.e., making better decisions. Project leaders who focus exclusively on the “boxes and arrows” of workflow action improvement will often find themselves caught up fixing yesterday’s operations and systems issues.

Are your rules improving the boxes but constraining the diamonds? How is that rigidity affecting your long term performance? Do you have a team of high performance people that you can trust to deal with the diamonds in a flexible, agile way? Why not? And how do your underlying documents, even down to the employee handbook, support or impede that?